The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Solid-state drives (SSD) use solid-state memory to store data. Examples of solid state memory include static random access memory (SRAM), dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and flash memory. SSDs are less susceptible to mechanical failures compared to conventional hard disk drives. This is because SSDs do not include as many moving parts as conventional hard disk drives. Further, SSDs have a faster startup time than conventional hard disk drives. This is because, unlike conventional hard disk drives, SSDs do not have to wait for a disk to spin up to a particular speed before data can be read from or written to the disk.
An SSD may include a plurality of NAND flash memory cells or DRAM memory cells. NAND flash memory may include single-level cell (SLC) flash or multi-level cell (MLC) flash. SLC flash stores a single bit of data per cell, and MLC flash stores store two or more bits of data per cell.
Flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles. A controller coordinates read, write, and erase cycles of the flash memory. For example, the controller loads firmware to calculate or translate a logical memory address provided by a host to a physical address within the flash memory.